Presidents Cup International Team Wants ‘Separation’ From PGA Tour

The International Presidents Cup team is not just seeking its second-ever win in the 32-year-old golf competition this week at Medinah Country Club just outside Chicago. The ever-underdog squad of players from outside the U.S. and Europe is also hoping to gain ground in its long-term push for more independence from its American peers and PGA Tour organizers.

“I’m not very well-schooled in corporate structure, but it would be advantageous to the event, I think, to get a little bit more separation between the two teams,” International team captain Geoff Ogilvy tells Front Office Sports.

The biennial Presidents Cup has been owned and operated exclusively by the PGA Tour since its inception in 1994. That means the Tour runs both the U.S. and International teams—selecting captains, picking host sites, providing funding, marketing, ticket sales, and more. That’s in stark contrast to the Ryder Cup, the 99-year-old event the Presidents Cup was modeled after. (The Presidents Cup is played in the Ryder Cup’s off years.) 

The PGA of America—a separate entity from the PGA Tour—operates the U.S. Ryder Cup team, while the European side is run by Ryder Cup Europe, of which the European Tour Group is the managing partner.

“There are obvious challenges that come along with both teams being operated out of the same building,” says Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion and eight-time PGA Tour winner. The Australian was an assistant captain for the previous four International Presidents Cup teams. 

The U.S. team’s 12 players almost always have a higher average world ranking in either competition, but the talent gap is far more evident in the Presidents Cup—and the results show it. The U.S. leads the Presidents Cup 13-1-1 all-time, with the International team’s lone victory coming in 1998 in Melbourne, Australia. But Europe, fresh off a road victory last September, leads the Ryder Cup 12-9-1 since 1979, when players from all of continental Europe (not just Great Britain and Ireland) were added to the competition. 

Behind the Scenes

The U.S. and International Presidents Cup squads have identical financial resources for general team operations but separate support groups and liaisons within the PGA Tour to aid with everything from event and competition operations to commercial and marketing work. “From a governance perspective, it’s important for the International team to feel like they have the right players and leadership that directs the future,” PGA Tour chief commercial officer Dhruv Prasad tells FOS.

While many potential changes are being considered across the board, those don’t include selling any portion of the Presidents Cup to an international golf tour or federation that could theoretically take over International team operations. “Partnering with other international tours and even international events from the standpoint of building the Presidents Cup brand is something that’s absolutely on the table,” Prasad says.

The Presidents Cup is a major money-maker for the PGA Tour—more than 200,000 fans attended the 2024 edition in Montreal—but “the structure of the event I don’t think has evolved as fast as the actual event,” Ogilvy says.

It’s not for a lack of effort by International team leaders. 

In 2019, international players created a new identity called The Shield, giving players on their team a common symbol and colors—black and gold—to compete under, not dissimilar to Europe’s blue and yellow Ryder Cup branding. Ogilvy led that push alongside former captains including Canada’s Mike Weir and South Africa’s Ernie Els and Trevor Immelman.

With no formal chief executive leading the team’s operations, each cycle’s captain puts on the proverbial CEO hat, Ogilvy says, with the other assistant captains filling whatever administrative roles are needed. “We’ve just slowly but surely started to chip away at things,” Immelman tells FOS, although the ultimate goal of beating the Americans has so far remained out of reach. “It’s been a fun process,” he says. “It’s probably taken a hair longer than what we wanted or anticipated.”

Like Ogilvy, Immelman isn’t quite sure what the ultimate path is to a more independent International team, but is intrigued by the idea and has had his fair share of conversations about it with PGA Tour leaders. “With the ever-changing landscape of professional golf, who knows how things unfold here over the next few years,” he says.

The LIV Question

LIV Golf’s launch in 2022 severely weakened the International team with top players like Australia’s Cam Smith and Chile’s Joaquin Niemann no longer eligible to compete in the PGA Tour-operated Presidents Cup. The U.S. team had much more depth to withstand its own defectors, and the Ryder Cup did not ban LIV players.

Ogilvy says it’s “a shame” the International team was disrupted so much by LIV but acknowledges everyone knew what they were signing up for. “It would be nice to have access to pick from them,” he says. “But also not really because this group of players have been together, they play on the same tour—the PGA Tour—they have dinner, they play a lot of practice rounds, and it could upset the apple cart a little bit, too.”

With LIV’s future uncertain as the league goes through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Ogilvy remains optimistic about a reunion of sorts down the road. “Whatever the future looks like, hopefully it’s all lined up again and we get back to what it was like before, and we can have access to all the players,” he says.

Market Watch

Melbourne, Australia, will host the Presidents Cup for a fourth time in 2028. Montreal, Canada, has hosted the event twice, and South Africa and South Korea are the only two other nations to host outside the U.S. There has been significant inbound interest from countries wanting to host the 2032 edition, per Prasad—and if Ogilvy had his way, they would plant their flag somewhere new. “We have some really big markets that I don’t think we tap into well enough,” he says.

India is a country the Presidents Cup has never played in that is gaining steam as a potential host site among International team leaders and PGA Tour organizers; so is Japan. Further capitalizing on and returning to places like South Korea and South Africa are key objectives, too. 

For Ogilvy, it all goes back to the PGA Tour’s structure of the Presidents Cup and the Internationals’ goal of “trying to create a little bit of space” between itself and the Americans. “I think The Shield and the players we have on our team are global icons, and I don’t know if you can really be as good as you can at that from Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida,” he says.